CNN Is Closing Down Beme, YouTube Star Casey Neistat’s Video Company
buzzfeed.com
buzzfeed.com
What didn't make sense to me is why they didn't "step on the gas" and accelerate the speed of their app development and content. I overall enjoyed the Beme youtube vids and it seemed they were finally honing in on the right track, and as mentioned earlier the Beme Panels app showed promise.
However, the videos were a bit infrequent, not pumping out as much video content as competitors VICE or Vox, or even CNN's own previous acquisition "Great Big Story". The Panels app was still in closed beta and only brought in a trickle of users instead of trying to bring in even more to provide more data points and diversity of content/conversation.
Being a subscriber to Casey's YouTube channel, it seems to me that Casey is the kind of person that's a self-starter that likes to change things up a lot (which works for YouTube vids), but when it comes to consistently working on something that's more finite for long periods of time he doesn't have the knack for it.
I've followed Bourdain through his many network changes, but his latest shows on CNN aren't the same. CNN is still relatively dry. Not for want of trying though... witness the number of times their newscasters shouted "shithole" with glee recently. :)
Personally, Neistat is not appealing to me, but he had an existing audience that I guess CNN execs were willing to give it a shot. That to me is desperation, not execution.
It's always been that way, other than brief exceptions (the 1991 Gulf War was probably the longest).
Sad, but seemed like a predictable outcome. Neistat is great, but never saw how his approach would succeed inside a large corporate operation or how he could monetize the “brand” beyond his very successful YouTube following.
Casey Neistat is a talented daily lifestyle vlogger, and apparently not a talented venture startup video platform CEO.
Somewhat irrelevant though, as he takes home annual-salary-sized checks for every video that he puts on youtube.
I thought Beme was dumb, just curious to learn more about the mechanics of this kind of deal.
Sounds nice, right?!
But, and this is admittedly a big assumption, this smelt like an acquihire at the time so I imagine the deal was structured in a way that allowed the financial investors to cash out with a respectable return while the founders committed to some form of earn-out to ensure their commitment and loyalty to making the platform a success for CNN. Given how quickly the shutdown occurred, you have to assume they didn't meet the metrics in the buy-out so will be leaving some (a lot?) of that purchase price on the table. If we assume a 50% discount that brings the net price down to under $10m split across a group of 10+ employees with the two founders presumably capturing about 80% of that. After tax ~ possibly at their prevailing income tax rate vs long-term capital gains ~ he may have realized a low-single digit million exit which is nothing to sneeze at for the vast majority of us especially given the quick turnaround. Now, if CNN negotiated hard on the earn-out or the investors had something other than 1x preferred it's possible that number is significantly lower, but none of us really know.
Sounds like things went poorly. Anyone know if this affected his earn-out (if there was one) or if they're just calling this whole thing a bust?
The first launch of Beme led to 400,000 downloads in the first 6 days. Users posted 1 million videos in that same time frame. While there were breakout areas or "10s of thousands of consistent users, "after the cool down from the initial launch, they saw user engagement fall and realized the product was not working. There was hope that there was still validity in the concept (posting unedited - authentic video footage); however, the app needed a redesign to thoroughly test the concept.
Beme has 11 full time employees (10 of which are technical, 1 of which runs their social media communities (Jack)). Casey does not collect a salary from Beme. With this being said, it sounds as if Casey does not include himself in this employee count as he would most likely fall into the non-technical category. Beme splits their employees into 3 teams. Most likely these are divided by platform: Android, iOS, and Web.
The burn rate for these 11 employees is $180,000/month or $2,160,000/ year. Beme has the option to monetize through in-app advertising, in-app purchases, and selling of user data. With no signs that any 3 of these revenue streams have been activated at this time these expenses are being paid for from the venture capital money raised.
The second release has seen a surge in downloads to over 1 million, with added engagement after the first 8 days of launch. Time will tell if the added interest is purely based off of Casey's current social clout, or if the concept has legs to become a standalone sharing platform.
https://techcrunch.com/video/casey-neistats-youtube-life/519...
> Look at this fucking cheetah.
> He doesn't slow down, he doesn't get distracted.
> If you slow down he will catch you and he will tear your FUCKING HEART OUT.
> Work Harder
> Work Faster
US startup culture is weird, man. Who, in good conscience, says something like that to their employees?
The production was good and the stories were interesting in a Vice type of way BUT they didn't output enough content. On YouTube amount of content is more valuable than production quality.
PS Casey states that Beme is moving into CNN and will still actually produce content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfIhBu0TZBs
Them: "Hey Casey, you should vlog the womans march" Him: "Nah, I'm going to go surfing with my buddies".
I bet this lead to a lot of frustration from both sides when Neistat didn't want to play along.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ob4hS6ymCJZOVA_F7KTvMcFJc5z...
Recent developments, like Facebook's decision to let its users determine what is and isn't factual (what is essentially Beme's advertised product), will lead to sanctioned groupthink.
Taking a small subsection of a group and painting it as the majority is one of the oldest disinformation tactics.
AKA stereotype
By the standard of the person you are showing the news to.
C.f.: collaborative filtering. Or how Netflix recommends movies.
It doesn't really matter. Groupthink is already "sanctioned" by the group. If something gets flagged as "non-factual" it will just embolden all the supporters of that thing.
- http://news.mit.edu/2017/algorithm-better-wisdom-crowds-0125
- https://www.princeton.edu/news/2017/02/06/crowd-wisdom-surpr...
Although it seems like there needs to be more research on the boundary cases
Then again, good on Casey Neistat for squeezing out hopefully a cool few million from CNN.